Aweekstweets Sept 27 to Oct 4 2009

Aweekstweets Sept 27 to Oct 4 2009

• "80% of Twitterers tweet mostly about themselves" (http://bit.ly/1esLMg): JK--Not social networking. It's I'M-SO-SPECIAL networking.19 minutes ago from TweetDeck
• JK2---Let’s not imagine we’re becoming altruistic with all this “social networking” going on. We’re primarily tooting our own horns, letting off steam, indulging in our obsessions, measuring ourselves against others, finding shoulders to cry on, grabbing whatever we can put our virtual hands on, and otherwise just being more completely into ourselves. I don’t find a lot of actual collaboration, charity, and mutual aid being transacted among all these so-called “friends.”
• Thank you "sesli sohpet" for your comment "eğlencenin sohpetin arkadaşlığın tek adresi" on my latest blog. My reply: "rwejl ajfqkt rjigfjs."about 4 hours ago from TweetDeck
• JK2---Ah yes, remember blogs? This was a bot-generated gibberish response to my most recent Forrester blogpost. I turned off the comments feature in James Kobielus’ Blog ages ago. I was tired of bot spam. I was also tired of moronic, superficial, or irrelevant comments by people who obviously hadn’t taken the time to actual read or understand my post.
• RT @santaferraro "SOA+BPO can produce self-optimizing models for... customer offers, supply, etc" JK--Yes. Auto model scoring/eval/promotionabout 4 hours ago from TweetDeck
• JK2---One of the key solution differentiators in the predictive analytics and data mining market is the ability to a) generate multiple alternative models (with different algorithms, approaches) from a common historical data set, b) promote the “champion” model with the most predictive power to inline production status, c) regularly re-score the champion and all “challenger” models against fresh data, and d) automatically promote a challenger to production when it shows greater predictive power than the former champion. From what I can see, that’s the emphasis of “self-optimizing models.”
• RT @scottkarp "journalists can find 'clues' on Twitter & provide thoughtful analysis & summary." JK--More than clues: can find entire "lead"about 4 hours ago from TweetDeck
• JK2---Hey tech industry professionals, believe it or not, you can stop reading your e-mail and just focus on reading your tweets each day. If you get tweet feeds from the right mix of publications, vendors, analysts, consultants, users, and others, you can stay abreast of the day’s news and commentary through your Twitter client. If you want further depth and context, you simply follow the tinyURLs back to longer articles or blogposts. There is far richer aggregate content every single day on Twitter than we give it credit for. In fact, I’d rather monitor Twitter than the blogosphere, which is not an efficient news-dissemination medium.
• Service-Oriented Analytics and business process optimization? Yep: reuse models in BPM/LOB apps, & optimize decisions thru real-time scoringabout 5 hours ago from TweetDeck
• JK2---Predictive models will become just as central to transactional applications in the future as relational databases are today. Predicting a customer’s likely response to alternative offers is key to customer relationship management. Predicting future resource requirements is central to enterprise resource planning. Predicting likely logistical bottlenecks is essential for supply chain optimization. And so on and so forth.
• Service-Oriented Analytics and technology populism? Yep: enable end users to mashup, publish, share, and reuse analytics collaboratively!about 6 hours ago from TweetDeck
• JK2---Companies can only meet the future head-on if they empower everybody with predictive modeling expertise. No, you don’t have to become a statistician or soothsayer. You simply need to be able to create business planning, time series, and what-if scenarios that leverage the best models and visualizations that others publish in spreadsheets, reports, and dashboards. And you need to be able to share out your best models for others to use and extend for their own needs.
• Service-Oriented Analytics and lean management? Yep: don't build any analytics that you can't reuse to the max!about 6 hours ago from TweetDeck
• JK2---Nothing’s worse than buried treasure—millions of spreadsheet models trapped on desktops, unknown and inaccessible to others who might benefit from them to address new business problems. Every business model—expressed as a Excel spreadsheets, logistic regression model, neural network model, whatever—should be searchable, shareable, and available for maximum reuses throughout your company.
• E-mail client apps are a far more productive fast-spam-deletion tool than browser interfaces. Which is why I'm not going full browser.3:14 PM Oct 1st from TweetDeck
• JK2---Still, to date, nobody has really implemented “bulk mail” folders properly. None of the anti-spam services that I’ve used ranks the mail in that folder by degree of likely spamminess, so I can sift the false-positives with fewer keystrokes or mouse-clicks, and with a single rapid glance.
• BTW, my Aweekstweets 3 wks ago, per tweet-volley with @jamet123, was kernel of today's Service-Oriented Analytics blog. My thinking builds.2:58 PM Oct 1st from TweetDeck
• JK2---You have to reuse your own work to the maximum extent possible. I have to do analysis on the run, and lash it all together into a coherent structure at a moment’s notice. Try being an analyst in this industry, and you’ll see what I mean.
• You start to click one window/object, but another pops up suddenly in its place, and you mistakenly click that. Whatcha call those moments?2:48 PM Oct 1st from TweetDeck
• JK2---I call it “clickjacking.”
• RT @SethGrimes @atmanes "Talmud [etc] are pre-electronic hypertext" JK--This is sorta like arguing who was the Bob Dylan of 15th century.1:58 PM Oct 1st from TweetDeck
• JK2---Footnotes. Endnotes. Tables of contents. Sidebars. Indexes. Who invented those? That’s as much “hypertext” as anything in the Talmud. Essentially, they’re all cross-referencing navigation guides pointing to and/or containing material with some direct or tangential relation to the main text.
• RT @atmanes "TimBL and co. at CERN developed a hypertext system in 1990. " JK--Thanks for listing milestones in Internet ongoing re-invention12:13 PM Oct 1st from TweetDeck
• JK2---Let’s split hairs here. Was the “Internet” invented when ARPANET went live in 1969? When TCP/IP was defined a few years later? When the term “Internet” was coined? When DNS was established? You see what I mean? No one innovation defined this still-evolving creation we call “the Internet.”
• New Forrester blogpost: "Service-Oriented Analytics: Tapping into the Predictive Smarts of Your Entire Organization" (http://bit.ly/aZlhE)12:12 PM Oct 1st from TweetDeck
• JK2---Read it.
• Internet keeps re-inventing itself. Newspapers keep on re-inventing themselves. Institutions accrete: don't spring entire from Zeus' head.8:58 AM Oct 1st from TweetDeck
• JK2---Newspapers today are a far cry from the broadsides of the 1700s, the penny press of the 1800s, and the dense gray hard-news periodicals of the pre-WWII period. Most of today’s newspapers are in fact collections of feature stories heavy on analysis, graphical blandishment, and human interest. Everybody got the actual “news” hours before on the Internet, or continuous TV news channels.
• "Bing Records First Monthly Decline Since Launch" (http://bit.ly/pMHYZ) JK--Bada BING bada boom? Or bada BING bada BUST? You decide!6:57 AM Oct 1st from TweetDeck
• JK2---Today’s search engine wars feel so yesteryear. Just as yesteryear’s browser wars feel as ancient as the Punic Wars. The new battlefield for “eyeballs” is in social media.
• TweetDeck has UI of one-armed bandit. Drop quarter/tweet into slot/box. Pull the arm/[enter]. Watch wheels [all friends:mentions:DMs) spin.8:07 PM Sep 30th from TweetDeck
• JK2---Seriously. Pay attention to the entire experience of using this and similar Twitter clients. It almost feels McLuhanesque: it’s a new visual grammar for consuming streams of real-time intelligence from all over the planet. Just as TV shaped our global consciousness in the 50s and 60s.
• RT @timoelliott "had to listen to 20 years of [tiresome definition wars re BI]" JK-Not as annoying as metaphysics of "data" v "intelligence"7:59 PM Sep 30th from TweetDeck
• JK2---This is all ersatz armchair epistemology. Seriously. I don’t recall any actual, honest-to-God, pedigreed philosophers debating this “data” vs. “information” vs. “intelligence” vs. “insight” jazz. Give it a rest please, BI industry. Nobody justifies an investment in one BI tool over another based on one vendor’s ability to help you deliver any of these higher-order “i-words” any more efficiently. Likewise, I’ve yet to come across a DBA who boasts that their data warehouse packs more “insights” per terabyte or per-dollar spent than the previous one.
• RT @tkgeorge @timoelliott @merv "debating "BI is not X" semantics = monumental waste of time." JK--Huh? 10-sec tweet-blurt = no time at all!3:15 PM Sep 30th from TweetDeck
• JK2---Debating these never-ending definitional issues is something we do as small talk, out in the hallway over coffee between sessions with substance. It’s an ice-breaker. Not a waste of time. Just a way to fill otherwise idle time.
• RT @JeromePineau "Is MSFT doing/saying anything about columnar re: Madison or are they still all about rows?" JK--Re Madison, still all rows3:13 PM Sep 30th from TweetDeck
• JK2---Another one of these never-ending debates in the BI and data warehousing space: the query performance benefits of column-based data storage/access (i.e., what Sybase, Vertica, ParAccel, SenSage, Infobright, and others offer) vs. row-based (which is what most DBMS/DW vendors implement). Another one of those highly technical issues that one dare not mention in a social setting devoid of DBAs.
• Synonyms abound for condition of "too much": surfeit, surplus, superfluity, excess, plethora. Really, it's all too much!2:14 PM Sep 30th from TweetDeck
• JK2---All of these ones listed are in the working vocabularies of most people with a college education. A healthy command of synonyms gives writing texture and poetry. No—don’t consult Roget’s unless you already know a word, understand its meaning, and simply want a second opinion on some subtle shade of meaning. Nothing’s more obvious than a fool with a thesaurus who plops a slightly-wrong quasi-synonym—the verbal equivalent of a sour note—into their writing.
• RT @JeromePineau "Isn't IQ columnar & ORCL claiming hybrid now?" JK--I said "most"; Sybase, Vertica, etc are; ORCL just partly in ExadataV21:41 PM Sep 30th from TweetDeck
• JK2---Questions such as this presuppose that it’s somehow inevitable or especially virtuous for vendors--and by implication, users—to “go columnar.” There’s a lot of this assumption floating around the industry. If columnar were so much slam-dunk superior to row-based storage (which has partitioning, indexes, join strategies, materialized views, and the like to speed its queries), then why didn’t everybody adopt columnar en masse long ago?
• Still this odd enduring notion that columnar database vendors compete primarily against each other. Duh--most top DW vendors non-columnar!1:25 PM Sep 30th from TweetDeck
• JK2---Fortunately, the columnar database vendors themselves are not very parochial. Sybase, Vertica, and others duke it out—fairly effectively—with row-based RDBMS vendors on the criteria that matter: fast queries, fast loads, mixed-query workload management, and the like.
• Is Twitter tracking which human being tweeters are the most hashtag-intensive in their tweets. My fingers stumble that high on keyboard.1:17 PM Sep 30th from TweetDeck
• JK2---Maybe it’s just me, but I find that too many hashtags interrupt the flow of a tweet, and make it even less readable than it already is. A hashtag-intensive tweet looks like it’s more fit for machine-processing than human consumption.
• RT @nenshad: "ironic if scoring a pa/dm ranking algorithm by hand." JK--Is fingers on keyboard "by hand"? Standard Forrester Wave scorecard.1:15 PM Sep 30th from TweetDeck
• JK2---Not ironic at all. “Scoring” means one thing in the predictive analytics and data mining (PA/DM) arena, and something entirely different where vendor/product evaluation is concerned.
• Local TV meteorologist on global warming this morning: "These are only models." Yep, myriad warring predictive models mining common history1:07 PM Sep 30th from TweetDeck
• JK2---Scoring a global warming model, in PA/DM terms, involves marshalling a massive and growing body of scientific research data to validate the predictive power of a massive and growing (and contentious) range of scientific hypotheses. “These are only models” means “these are only the current ‘champion’ models favored by whoever in the scientific community has the upper hand at this time, and which may be eclipsed in the future by today’s ‘challenger’ models for various reasons, with economics, government funding, partisan politics, and shifting cultural zeitgeist among those reasons.”
• Crunching thru vendor data gathered under Forrester PA/DM Wave. Yes, dear vendors--I'm pondering EVERY LAST DETAIL. Will start scoring soon.12:50 PM Sep 30th from TweetDeck
• JK2---And yes, dear readers, I print out much of it to read on airplanes. Can’t stand craning my neck to watch in-flight movies. Much rather Zune in and zone out.
• RT @merv: RT @nenshad: "Please repeat after me: BI ≠ reporting" JK--Please repeat after ME: advanced analytics ≠ BI.12:42 PM Sep 30th from TweetDeck
• JK2---Please repeat after me: “BS ≠ BI.”
• Interviewed by Jeff Kelly (http://bit.ly/8i3iw) on DW appl vdr "same-day deploy&value" claims. Yep, I said, it happens: for specific deploys12:40 PM Sep 30th from TweetDeck
• JK2---My actual e-mail response: “A fair share of marketing hype, for sure. Yes, of course all of these DW appliances can be “up and running in less than a day.” But the issue is: can they be optimized for all of the customer’s queries and loads, and integrated with all the customer’s BI applications and data sources, in less than a day. To the extent that the customer, or the DW appliance vendor working on-site with the customer, can do that optimization and integration in a matter of hours, yes indeed it is possible to get “deep analytical insights” the same day from data processed through the appliance. This scenario is certainly possible, and I’ve heard many DW appliance users who say they’ve done it. It’s especially possible/feasible for the simpler DW appliance deployments: in other words, those that involve a limited range of queries, reports, ETL jobs, sources) where the DW appliance is already pre-certified to work with the customer’s existing BI and ETL tools. It’s also especially possible/feasible if the DW appliance you’re deploying incorporates the same DBMS (e.g., Oracle, IBM DB2, Microsoft SQL Server) as your previous DW environment—which means the migration of data, schemas, indexes, queries, ETL, and metadata is correspondingly simpler than if y you are migrating to a DW appliance that incorporates some DBMS you’ve never used before.”
• What you realize re tweets, columns, analyst rpts, even books, it's not wordcount. It's the "call" you make. That's the payload, the impact!12:10 PM Sep 30th from TweetDeck
• JK2---My shortest, sharpest tweets often have bulletforce impact.
• I generate tweet fodder as I generated Network World op-eds for 21+ years. Milk the moment. Develop a POV. Bang 'em out. Don't look back.12:04 PM Sep 30th from TweetDeck
• JK2---If you’re receptive and prepared, your freshest of-the-moment observations are often the truest. Tweet ‘em! Now!
• Speaking of tweet-tight, that's not always best approach. I prefer "keeper" slides that I study in detail, hold for future reference.11:34 AM Sep 30th from TweetDeck
• JK2---I often lose interest in purely eye-candy too-high-level business-value blathering presentations. I want substance.
• RT @Victor_Sokovin "Exadata V2 cell equivalent in Teradata [AMPS]?" JK--DK. Larger issue: need industry-standard DW performance benchmarks.11:27 AM Sep 30th from TweetDeck
• JK2---I’ve sketched out thoughts for those, but haven’t developed them to any degree. Yet. Personal action item for 2010.
• RT @randydarthur "I am more than a MARCOM router." JK--To the extent one becomes a router, one's credibility suffers. Analysts add value.8:03 AM Sep 30th from TweetDeck
• JK2---It’s an ongoing struggle, as an analyst, to not get manipulated into becoming an unwitting tool of vendor marketing apparatus. We all push against that. Vendors love us because we’re in a position to influence customers. Vendors love us, but it’s what the sociologists call a “secondary relationship” kind of love, not a “primary relationship.” A secondary relationship is where we “use” each other.
• Thanks Twitter follow-me requesters for the personally empowering, search-engine-optimizing, Internet-marketing advice. But all full up!7:15 AM Sep 30th from TweetDeck
• JK2---Speaking of being used. These sorts of twitterers want to extract cash from us (use their direct-marketing consulting services), so that we can, in turn, extract cash from others (direct-market whatever it is we peddle to others).
• Noticing that reporters and other analysts fail to grasp Oracle Exadata v2 significance. Comprehensive in-DB analytics primary. OLTP 2nd-ary7:09 AM Sep 30th from TweetDeck
• JK2---The Oracle’s marketing the latter angle. So it’s not just the reporters/analysts who are misrepresenting the significance of this release.
• Dear Twitterers & Facebookers: Please don't send "EVERYBODY SHOULD READ THIS ARTICLE!" e-security blasts. Neverending alertstreams grow old!7:03 AM Sep 30th from TweetDeck
• JK2---After a few such blasts from on individual or entity on a social network, I’m inclined to unfollow them. Cry wolf!
• Dear Twitterers at Industry Events: Don't tweet the exact same promotional boilerplate that the sponsoring vendor handed you.6:59 AM Sep 30th from TweetDeck
• JK2---Commercial vendor-driven friend-spam from otherwise trusted sources tends to strain relationships. Unless of course you’re plugging a Forrester conference, then it’s cool!
• RT @CurtMonash "Workload mgmt is a necessary but not sufficient condition for OLTP/DW integration." JK--Yeah, of course. Other conditions?6:54 AM Sep 30th from TweetDeck
• JK2---Example of Curt being curt.
• Fear uncertainty & doubt are our fate. Change is big FUD generator, but so is stagnation. Arbitrariness of it all is what we can't abide.10:00 PM Sep 29th from TweetDeck
• JK2---One friend loved this one. Thanks. I labored over it a bit more than I do most tweets.
• RT @marcusborba: "integrating OLTP & DW w/ Exadata 2) @CurtMonash http://bit.ly/28tWI0" JK--Oracle workload mgt tools are key ingredient.9:40 PM Sep 29th from TweetDeck
• JK2---The larger picture of Oracle Exadata v2 is that it provides an intelligent storage layer that enables any application logic—OLTP, OLAP, predictive analytics, data cleansing, etc.—to be executed, scaled, and accelerated through massive parallelism. This intelligent storage layer virtualizes across disk- and cache-based persistence, leveraging hybrid columnar- and row-based persistence. Oracle workload management, resource governance, and policy tools enable all of these applications to coexist in a distributed Exadata fabric with load isolation, high availability, and guaranteed SLAs.
• NYC notorious 1800s slum "5 Points"' only remaining "point" is corner of Worth & Baxter: SW corner of Columbus Park: Scorsese "Gangs of NY"9:35 PM Sep 29th from TweetDeck
• JK2---My cousin told me all 5 points remain in the street plan of Manhattan, and that they’re in Chinatown. Not true: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five_Points,_Manhattan
• "Nobel vs. Ig Nobel" (http://bit.ly/N1dQ5): JK--Ig Nobel awards: like late Sen. Proxmire's Golden Fleece prizes, minus the federal funding9:27 PM Sep 29th from TweetDeck
• JK2---More interesting than the Nobel Prizes is the long list of ignobilities that have received the prize, and the long list of nobilities ignored: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_Prize_controversies
• "Talend Acquires Master Data Management Firm" (http://bit.ly/f9pcg): JK--OK, but Talend can't make serious go in MDM without consulting arm.9:19 PM Sep 29th from TweetDeck
• JK2---Yes, MDM is a key component of a full data management “stack.” But the notion of a data management “stack” is starting to feel obsolete. The deeper the stack, the more likely you are to get crushed under the sheer complexity and cost of all that software. The more complex your requirements for a “single version of truth” data management capability, the more you want a strategic partner to help you assemble the lean subset of one or more vendor “stacks” to meet your specific needs.
• "Way Over Yonder In the Minor Key" (http://bit.ly/VVCMZ): lyric: WGuthrie, music: BBragg. Woulda been cool to hear Woody & Billy harmonize.9:15 PM Sep 29th from TweetDeck
• JK2---Both of them with homely voices, but Billy’s working class English in the lower register, Woody’s middle class Okie in the upper, somehow you know they would have merged into a righteous blend of singin’ transatlantic leftie cuzzins.
• My initial macro-blog strategy in '04 was quick riffs on the day's news. My initial micro-blog strategy in '09 has been that + quasi-msging8:42 PM Sep 29th from TweetDeck
• JK2---The day’s news keeps me off-balance and paying attention. Quasi-messaging keeps you that way.
• @jowyang @rwang0 @charleneli "How Would You Define a Social Network?" (http://bit.ly/N0rnv): JK--Pub-sub P2P identity, content, & status net8:40 PM Sep 29th from TweetDeck
• JK2---A social network is a) person to person (to person to person to person ad infinitum, building communities of greater or lesser extent), b) publish-and-subscribe (all the persons giving and taking all kinds of stuff), c) identity (all the persons publishing and subscribing their identities, profiles, peeves, passions, etc. to varying degrees), d) content (all the persons publishing and/or consuming content in the form of blog posts, status updates, tweets, podcasts, etc. to varying degrees), and e) status (all the persons publishing and subscribing to alerts re their new content, new identity attributes, new responses to other people’s content, etc.).
• Try as I may, I cannot work hashtags into my Twitter style. Something about me doesn't want to spend my life stoking search engines.8:35 PM Sep 29th from TweetDeck
• JK2---In the abstract, hashtags are cool: implementing a shared, user-extensible taxonomy/ontology (“folksonomy”) of key subject domains, to facilitate more efficient search, classification, and aggregation. In the concrete, hashtags are a pain: burdening tweeters with having to remember them or look them up, with having to type them into our tweets in the heat of the moment, and with having to grant them precious real-estate within the 140-char footprint. I rarely bother. There must be a better, more automatic way to implement folksonomies in Twitter.
• "Mozilla denies it will 'ribbonize' Firefox" (http://bit.ly/3BXRSP): JK--Huh? Did I miss something? Unwelcome new verb? Clippy redux?8:34 PM Sep 29th from TweetDeck
• JK2---I don’t mind the “ribbon” in Windows Vista or in Office 2007. I simply mind not being able to toggle to a non-ribbon interface.
• "The multitasking myth" (http://bit.ly/gncCD): JK--My mind's only working on 1 task at time. I arrange physical self to rapidly mind-switch.8:30 PM Sep 29th from TweetDeck
• JK2---No, I’m not some Star Trek mutant. What I mean is that I feng shui my physical space for max productivity. I pile things with exquisite attention to fast physical search and retrieval.
• Everything blows over. Today's wind- & sun-stabbed early autumn bluster. Deck chairs. My late afternoon headache. Recollections of August.8:22 PM Sep 29th from TweetDeck
• JK2---August augurs autumn.
• Social media & BAM, 2-way visibility: you into customer pain, they into your processes #Forrester BTF (http://bit.ly/2F4Kky) Chicago Oct 8-98:14 PM Sep 29th from TweetDeck
• JK2--- Visibility is the most disruptive force in the business worlds. Social media provide the most powerful new telescope since Galileo, providing consumers, resellers, business partners, and other stakeholders with deep visibility into how enterprises are serving, or failing to address, their needs. In the process, social media, and other visibility technologies such as business activity monitoring (BAM), are changing the balance of power across organizations everywhere. In this session, Forrester analysts Natalie Petouhoff and James Kobielus will discuss the transforming role of social media and BAM, which are fostering greater engagement among stakeholders, improving customer service, and optimizing value chains. Full visibility is key: into your customers, their pain. Learn how social media and BAM enable end-to-end process visibility and thereby fuel transparent engagement between executives, employees. and customers and other business stakeholders. Understand how social media and BAM contribute to superior business performance by using visibility to clarify points of responsibility and accountability for operational and change processes. Discover how social media and BAM provide the information--voice of customer (VoC) data for social media, key process and performance indicators for BAM-- needed to transform all business functions and foster cross-organizational collaboration, multidisciplinary teaming, and agile response to competitive pressures
• "Vint Cerf Details Interplanetary Plans for DTN " (http://bit.ly/2Li116): JK--Disruption Tolerant Networking. Old ARPANET dreams don't die.4:21 PM Sep 29th from TweetDeck
• JK2---Ground control to Major Vint.
• Every time I refer to the "R" language, I put that letter in quotemarks. Helps me search for it later. Ought to be standard practice.10:08 AM Sep 29th from TweetDeck
• JK2---Inadvertent steganography. Single-character names hide in plain sight. You humans can easily pick them out of the noise, but search engines can’t.
• Social media->conversations->reveal hidden affinities->communities->customer loyalty. #Forr BTF (http://bit.ly/2F4Kky) Oct 8-9 Chicago.7:44 PM Sep 28th from TweetDeck
• JK2---To change the subject just slightly: Natalie Petouhoff and I both graduated from Livonia (Michigan) Stevenson High School. I’m 2 years older than her. Her photo’s in the sophomore section of my senior yearbook. We didn’t know that affinity until the week before last, when we were rehearsing our joint preso long-distance. Idle chit-chat, one thing led to the next, to the “omigod!” revelation. We never actually “met” back then or heard of each other. Though, undoubtedly, we crossed paths many times in the hallways in the 1975-76 school year.
• RT @lcecere: "A hotel with a view of the parking lot. So much for glamorous life of an analyst!" JK--Glamour? Ha! It's non-stop hard work.7:15 PM Sep 27th from TweetDeck
• JK2---There’s fun too. But the fun’s always sandwiched into and around the work. At my age, I have no idea anymore what “glamour” is. Then again, nerd that I am, maybe I never did.
• So far the fall colors are all in the sky. Deep cool orange sunset tonight over northern Virginia. Last week's cricket din a distant memory.7:05 PM Sep 27th from TweetDeck
• JK2---Must bring sweater to Chicago.

FORRESTER blog repost Service-Oriented Analytics: Tapping into the Predictive Smarts of Your Entire Organization

Service-Oriented Analytics: Tapping into the Predictive Smarts of Your Entire Organization

By James Kobielus

Advanced analytics is a key competitive weapon of companies everywhere. Visionary organizations are those that take a future-facing, analysis-driven perspective on new challenges. They do this by grounding management forecasts in solid historical information sets, leveraging and extending companies’ existing investments in data mining and predictive modeling.

To become truly future-focused, organizations must build out their predictive muscles through deepening commitment to these and other advanced analytics technologies, which also include interactive visualization, multivariate statistical analysis, text analytics, and massively parallel enterprise data warehousing. However, enterprises must be careful not to adhere to the common practice of implementing advanced analytics tools in tactical, application-specific silos. One of the downsides of this traditional practice is that diverse predictive modeling teams can find it difficult to share their deep domain expertise, best statistical approaches, and most powerful data exploration and visualization features.

How can companies realize the transformative potential of predictive analytics for business success? For starters, you must get rid of siloes that fragment your data mining initiatives into separate camps. You must also build a bridge between your data mining operations and the teams that manage your text analytics, business intelligence, complex event processing, and business process management efforts. And the key approach for silo-smashing is service-oriented architecture (SOA).

At first glance, SOA may seem like a foreign topic to many analytics professionals, but it shouldn’t be. In the broadest perspective, SOA refers to best practices for encouraging greater reuse, sharing, and cross-platform interoperability among key business resources. Typically, one associates SOA with reuse of one specific type of resource: application functionality that is distributed across heterogeneous, networked platforms. Nevertheless, key SOA principles—such as standards-based service virtualization, reuse, brokering, and governance—are as applicable to predictive models as to any other resource that lives online.

Predictive models empower your product managers, marketing specialists, risk managers, process analysts, senior executives, and other personnel with access to sophisticated forecasting, time-series analysis, and scenario-testing tools. Each model is a statistical encapsulation of your business’ current view of the future in some specific application, subject, or decision-support area. Incorporating the expertise of subject-matter experts, these models allow organizations to gauge the potential impact of future projects, campaigns, and other initiatives, and also to adjust execution of these initiatives in mid-stream.

Predictive analytics need not be a purely blue-sky planning tool. This technology can sit at the core of your SOA strategy, and leading-edge enterprises are in fact doing that. Companies in such verticals as financial and telecommunications are embedding predictive logic deeply into data warehouses, business process management (BPM) platforms, complex event processing (CEP) streams, and operational applications.

What will it take for your company to fully align your advanced analytics efforts with your SOA strategy? Most important, Service-Oriented Analytics requires an executive-level commitment to becoming a predictive enterprise on all levels. From the perspective of your existing predictive modeling teams, this will require an ongoing focus on collaboration across business, function, and subject domains. You should create a culture and offer incentives that encourage modeling professionals to reuse each other’s expertise on problems that cross multiple domains.

Reuse is everything. Here are some high-level guidelines for establishing a reuse-friendly Service-Oriented Analytics practice in your company:

• Reuse modeling best practices: Start by consulting Forrester’s report on setting up a Business Intelligence Solution Center (BISC), which we defined as “an institutional steward, protector, and forum for BI best practices.” Given that predictive analytics is a key segment of BI, you will find it necessary to incorporate this technology into your BISC’s scope.
• Reuse modelers: Cultivate a professional cadre of predictive modeling experts who are more than just wizards in advanced statistics and mathematics. Encourage subject-matter experts in all business areas to undertake predictive modeling projects and to team with modeling experts in other projects, applications, and business units. Provide incentives for modelers to regularly move between business units and subject domains, thereby spreading their expertise throughout the enterprise.
• Reuse models: You should begin to investigate predictive-model governance tools, which support version control, check-in/check-out, and other controls over models created in and imported from diverse tools. Model governance tools—from vendors such as SAS, SPSS, and KXEN--facilitate reuse, consolidation, combination, and cross-synthesis among disparate models. And you should also investigate options for embedding predictive models within BI, BPM, and other operational applications, thereby leveraging your growing analytic asset into new deployments.
  

As you deploy predictive models into operational applications, you should provide other applications with SOA-based access to them through Web services, Web 2.0, and other standardized interfaces. In that way, you will be creating a critical bridge to your application development teams and be creating a thoroughly Service-Oriented Analytics environment.

Your first steps down this road are clear. Forrester will be happy to assist you in developing a detailed enterprise roadmap for Service-Oriented Analytics. In so doing, you’ll be better able to tap into the future-facing analytic expertise that exists throughout your business.

Aweekstweets Sept 20-27 2009 @jameskobielus

Aweekstweets Sept 20-27 2009 @jameskobielus

BTW, has anybody noticed the irony of the so-called "father of the Internet" being somebody named "Cerf"?4 minutes ago from TweetDeck
JK2—Surfing the Internet is still an apt metaphor. New waves of innovation just keep swelling this ocean of information and experience. It’s all we can do to stay on the board.

Scanned & posted to my Facebook key docs from 1991 attesting to Gore's pivotal role in commercializing the Internet. Setting record straightabout 8 hours ago from TweetDeck
JK2—Gore was one key catalyst in the development of the first truly new mass medium since television. He never claimed to be the “father of the Internet.” In fact, Vint Cerf—another key catalyst--never claimed that (admittedly sexist, paternalistic, simplistic, GreatMan-istic) role either. It’s simply a matter of Gore’s political enemies exaggerating what he claimed in order to tarnish his legacy and keep him from gaining the presidency.

"Cerf: Turning off pieces of the 'Net 'not sensible'" (http://bit.ly/15QDP3): JK--Bogus issue. No one's arguing POTUS needs to be Net-fuhrerabout 9 hours ago from TweetDeck
JK2—With reference to the proposed Snowe-Rockefeller legislation, Cerf sets the record straight in the linked article: “You understand the motivation behind it. It's people concerned about the dependency we have on the Net and the potential for that dependency to be very brittle. But the idea that the president would turn off pieces of the Internet is not sensible. On the other hand, focusing attention on the need to make the network more robust, more reliable, more resistant to various forms of either attack or infection is a really good thing to be attentive to. .... I don't think the president should try to turn off the Internet, and I don't think that he has any interest in trying to do that.” Heck, Bush Jr couldn’t “turn off” the civil aviation system in this country for long after 9/11? And what, exactly, would one “turn off” in response to a cyber-warfare attack? And isn’t “turning off,” or blocking, pieces of the Internet the preferred solution of the Chinese communists?

Anyone up for a Delete-a-Thon? How fast can you manually detect/purge spam from various accounts? It's everybody's everyday obstacle course.about 10 hours ago from TweetDeck
JK2—With a good e-mail client, a keyboard and mouse, a fast connection, and a net-side spamfiltering service, I can clear out a hundreds of spam in perhaps 30 seconds—with very high accuracy--from both my inbox, client-side bulk-mail folder, and online suspected mail folder. I have several e-mail inboxes, so we’re still talking a couple minutes of my time, at least, each and every morning.

RT @smarthart: "MRotenberg discusses modern day privacy." http://bit.ly/hW2vc: JK--It's power to make oneself less of a sitting-duck targetabout 10 hours ago from TweetDeck
JK2—Much of this is a “cows long since left the barn” discussion. Says Rotenberg: “Is the government going to use our data as it is supposed to or is it going to spy on us? Does the bank have good security or do we have to worry about breaches? If I give an email address to a cell phone company, am I going to get spammed? And is that quiz that just told me which European capital city I'm most like really trying to figure out who my friends are?” It’s also about the power to monetize your online self in all its informational splendor, including your blogs, tweets, and facebook status updates. Says Rotenberg: “This is modern-day privacy, about digital identity, the control of personal information, and the brewing battle between what we post and its commercial value.” Every last scrap of what we choose to share online will in fact be scooped up by the growing silent army of “listening engines” that leverage text analytics technologies: natural language processing, entity extraction, sentiment extraction, social network analysis, and the like. Some of these engines will correlate your profile, behaviors, and transactions based on your unique identity. Others will roll it all up into broad demographics and psychographics, to fine tune their strategy of reaching you and people like you. Try as you may to stop this silent army from targeting you with every last scrap of intelligence that you choose to share (or don’t realize you’re choosing to share, or others are digging up on you from disparate sources) you won’t succeed. Best to prepare your defenses. More powerful spam filtering, for example.

RT @chaskielt: R @kalido: Had in-depth conversation about Kalido KONA w/ @jameskobielus." JK--Kalido partnering with Netezza and QlikView.2:27 PM Sep 25th from TweetDeck
JK2—Forthcoming (not yet GA) solution appliance for master data management, with out-of-box information models (initially) for pharmaceutical sales and marketing analytics and insurance sales and distribution analytics. I haven’t yet come across a customer looking for a shrink-wrapped appliance for MDM. Usually, DW appliances are for query acceleration in a mart layer in front of an existing EDW hub. But give Kalido credit for pioneering a potential new market segment. KONA will become available in roughly the same timeframe as IBM’s pre-announced Smart Analytics System solution appliances (of which it has not yet announced specific vertical and horizontal applications and markets that will be addressed).

Just responded to Forrester customer email inquiry on BI-in-cloud. Reviewing research, I'd forgotten how many vendors in this immature space9:22 AM Sep 25th from TweetDeck
JK2--There is a growing range of vendors that offer DW in a public and/or private cloud environment, including Vertica, Kognitio, Aster, Greenplum, Microsoft, AppNexus, FathomDB, and 1010data. There is another group of vendors that specialize in offering the front-end reporting, query, dashboarding, OLAP, and other access, presentation, interaction, and delivery features of BI as cloud/hosted/SaaS subscription service. This list includes Bi3, Birst, BlinkLogic, FortiusOne, Good Data, InetSoft, JasperSoft, Oco, PivotLink, and QlikView, some, but not all, of which incorporate a hosted DW into their hosted BI offerings (all of which are managed from their own data centers, not public clouds). Furthermore, many leading BI vendors—including Actuate, IBM Cognos, Oracle, Panorama, SAP Business Objects, TIBCO, and QlikView—offer SaaS subscription access to their solutions (but none of them yet hosts these services in Amazon EC2 or any other public cloud).

Handled reporter inquiry on Oracle Exadata v2 last night. Key new feature: flash cache. Paves way to eventual all-SSD, all-in-memory DW/OLTP6:57 AM Sep 25th from TweetDeck
JK2-- Performance-wise, one of the most significant enhancements in the Exadata v2 machines is the cache-oriented database-acceleration technology (5 TB smart cache per machine), paving the architectural road toward an eventual phase-out of physical disk in favor of an all solid-state-drive (SSD) storage architecture for order-of-magnitude I/O bandwidth expansion. The new Sun-based machines, leveraging Exadata Smart Flash Cache (based on Sun FlashFire memory cards), offer significant improvement in Oracle Database 11g R2 query performance, and also in write-intensive online transaction processing (OLTP) applications.

Edited Wikipedia entry on Web data services (http://bit.ly/x2Iqs).7:28 AM Sep 24th from TweetDeck
JK2—A couple of days later, my revs stand unmolested. Here’s what it says up there as of this moment:
“Web data services [1]refers to service-oriented architecture (SOA) applied to data sourced from the World Wide Web and the Internet as a whole. Web data services enable maximal mashup, reuse, and sharing of structured data (such as relational tables), semi-structured information (such as Extensible Markup Language (XML) documents), and unstructured information (such as RSS feeds, content from web applications, commercial data from online business sources). In a Web data services environment, applications may subscribe to and consume information, provide and publish information for others to consume, or both. Applications that can serve as a consumer/subscriber and/or provider/publisher of Web data services include mobile computing, web portals, enterprise portals, online business software, social media, and social networks.[2]. Web data services may support business-to-consumer and business-to-business information-sharing requirements. Increasingly, enteprises are including web data services in their SOA implementations, as they integrate mashup-style user-driven information sharing into business intelligence, business process management, predictive analytics, content management, and other applications, according to industry analysts.[3] To speed development of web data services, enterprises can deploy technologies that ease discovery, extraction, movement, transformation, cleansing, normalization, joining, consolidation, access, and presentation of disparate information types from diverse internal sources (such as data warehouses and CRM systems) and external sources (such as commercial market data aggregators).[4] [5] Web data services build on industry-standard protocols, interfaces, formats, and integration patterns, such as those used for SOA, Web 2.0, Web-Oriented Architecture, and Representational State Transfer. In addition to operating over the public Internet, Web data services may run solely within corporate intranets, or across B2B supply chains, or even span hosted software as a service (SaaS) or cloud computing environments.

Finding the mobile carrier industry the chief proving ground for comprehensive in-db, in-cloud, and in-stream analytics.3:10 PM Sep 23rd from TweetDeck
JK2—The key apps for all these are customer churn analysis, customer up-sell/cross-sell prospecting, customer experience analysis, and fraud prevention/detection. Predictive models—embedded in the data warehouses, cloud computing environments, and real-time complex event processing streams upon which mobile carriers run their operations—enable carriers to maintain proactive 24x7 surveillance, look-ahead, and optimization of their environments on every level through fearsomely smart rules engines.

"Teradata: 'We were the original appliance vendor'" (http://bit.ly/1L2vTI): JK--Remember when DW vendors avoided the A-word like plague?1:22 PM Sep 23rd from TweetDeck
JK2—Nowadays, if a DW appliance vendor avoids the word “appliance,” it shows they have no clear sense for what customers are screaming for: one-stop shop for a complete, pre-integrated, pre-optimization solution portfolio on a hyper-fast hardware/software platform.

Expect DW appl vendors to push several envelopes in pitches: sub-$20K/TB affordability , super-100X query accel, & MR in-db analytics flex.11:25 AM Sep 23rd from TweetDeck
JK2—Maximum affordability, scalability, and flexibility. The MapReduce in-database analytics must be comprehensive enough to encompass pushdown of all functions—ETL, query, regression, scoring, etc.—into a massively parallel, distributed, virtual DW fabric.

Awaiting further price reductions among DW appl vendors. Expect sub-$20K/TB deal vol to grow, for core commodity DW, not incl add-ons & p.s.11:17 AM Sep 23rd from TweetDeck
JK2—DW deals for under $20,000 per terabyte (compressed, user data) for the platform (CPU, storage, I/O, query tools, loading tools) maintaining the core production tables. The sub-$20K/TB deal volume will consist primarily of deals in which that lowball pricing is accompanied by long-term customer subscriptions for maintenance/support, plus add-ons such as BI, ETL, DQ, and MDM, plus a host of professional services to put it all together, customize it, and optimize it all anew.

RT @dmscott @gmblogs #gm "Social media democratizes word of mouth." http://bit.ly/1y1WKQ : JK--Becomes word cloud of unseen flying fingers.8:39 AM Sep 23rd from TweetDeck
JK2—Most of which will feel unreal. Much of which will in fact will be auto-generated by spambots targeting suckers. Much of which will purport to come from reputable sources, or people who’ve “seen it, done it, used it” and whose testimonials must be believed. Caveat caveat caveat!

Analytics vendors need to maintain healthy "in-the-lab"/"in-customer-hands" balance on their techs. Too lab-weighted = PhDs gone wild!7:39 AM Sep 23rd from TweetDeck
JK2—I love the stuff in the lab. I could spend all my days and nights in the lab. I’m an analyst who sees countless me-too products. The stuff in the lab is usually the antidote to boredom—the seriously new stuff—for jaded old pros such as me. Then again, the people in the lab aren’t talking to customers and trying to develop and sell products. Caveat caveat caveat!

In business analytics, a "full-stack vendor" now refers to one that offers comprehensive hardware, software, and services portfolio.7:36 AM Sep 23rd from TweetDeck
JK2—“Full stack” doesn’t mean you should acquire everything or anything from that vendor. It just means their product/service catalog should guide your checklist of what, if you had all the budget in the world, you would in theory need for a feature-complete deployment of whatever.

Price wars! One DW appl vendor touting so-called "Cash4Clunkers" (3-yr sw subscr: #1 free, #2&3 cut-rate) incentive to migrate from rival.10:18 PM Sep 22nd from TweetDeck
JK2—I love when vendors disparage each other in the context of too-hip sales/marketing campaigns. Already, “Cash For Clunkers” feels a bit past its expiration date as a buzzphrase in the zeitgeist. But the DW appliance price war continues unabated.

RT @atanubasu: "Social media analysis: a new way of listening" http://bit.ly/buNdb: JK--Or new way of pigeonholing, with stats on your side.10:03 PM Sep 22nd from TweetDeck
JK2—Social media analysis drives clustering and segmentation, which in turn drive target marketing. From the recipient’s end of the target-marketing equation, it all begins to blur into spam and other invitations/solicitations that feel like they’re pitched at somebody else, not actually or specifically you. Trying to make your feel like you should be part of some “social network” that you don’t feel like you belong to, or which doesn’t add meaning to your personal experience.

RT @jackshafer: "Clay Shirky on investigative journalism” http://bit.ly/P5qhn: JK--Who'll replace reporters as watchdogs as newspapers fold?9:51 PM Sep 22nd from TweetDeck
JK2—Answer: analysts. Further context on that answer: that’s what the best reporters have always been, and most of the best are now bloggers.

"Netflix Awards Prize" (http://bit.ly/17N0um): jk--3-yr $1M contest to tweak movie-recommendation engine predictive model. Razor-thin finish9:46 PM Sep 22nd from TweetDeck
JK2—Is Netflix going to hire these people to score and evolve the model? It will decay, of course, and soon.

Most Hadoop being implemented in premises "clouds" (i.e., distributed, virtual, complex info/file stores), not public clouds.9:31 PM Sep 22nd from TweetDeck
JK2—Hadoop devotees bristle at being associated with in-database analytics alone.

RT @SethGrimes " DBMSs before electronic computers...edge-notched cards" JK--Wha? Any stackable non-volatile inscribed surfaces a database?5:44 PM Sep 22nd from TweetDeck
JK2—Let’s not imagine “databases”—a late 20th century innovation--as the pinnacle of human informational evolution. That is uncomfortably close to the “everything that’s ever going to be invented has already been invented” foolishness.

RT @nenshad: "Twitterese is "domain-specific language" in CS speak." JK--Yep. DSL for chatter-intensive attention-poor trivia-steeped domain5:41 PM Sep 22nd from TweetDeck
JK2—Let’s not imagine Twitter, in its current state, as the pinnacle of micro-expression on the Internet. Telegraphy gave way to paging, instant messaging, and SMS, then Twitter, and others will surely come. None of them created a new language—just a new constraint into which the old language mapped its complexity and stripped away distracting nuance. Essentially, each new micro-expression medium creates a new pidgin English (look up the technical linguistic definition of “pidgin”).

"The Perils of Cameras in Mobile Devices" (http://bit.ly/YtrKh): jk--Yeah. But also peril to collective memory from not having camera handy8:14 AM Sep 22nd from TweetDeck
JK2—Just keep snapping those camera photos. Future generations will thank you for “being there.”

What exactly is a "Luddite" anyway? I try not to complicate my tech life anymore than necessary. Only on my own terms. And when good & ready7:44 AM Sep 22nd from TweetDeck
JK2—For example, these aweekstweets.

Liking the new TweetDeck v0.30.5--the Facebook integration is much better, richer.3:41 PM Sep 21st from TweetDeck
JK2—But the new TweetDeck has its issues: the auto-URL-shortener is unreliable, and the Facebook link tends to de-select for no apparent reason.

RT @computerworld: "Dell agrees to buy Perot Systems for $3.9B" JK--HW a commodity, prof svcs not. Both Perot companies bought by HW vdrs.8:04 AM Sep 21st from TweetDeck
JK2—Sure am glad the little demagogue didn’t become president. Whatever became of the sucking sound he said NAFTA passage would cause as US jobs went down to Mexico? Last time I checked, Mexicans still flocking to the US, even in recessionary times. Good for them. Glad to have them here. And it’s good for them to know that US companies are not averse to investing south of the border, should they decide to go back home. My crystal ball tells me Mexico will become one of the world’s most powerful economies in this century.

Aweekstweets September 13-20 2009 @jameskobielus

1. Everything's "social" these days. Social DW? Compress terabyte data mart down to flash form. Trade 'em like baseball cards. Maybe not.about 7 hours ago from TweetDeck
   JK2—Social everything. What that refers to typically is an interpersonal pub-sub service with user-generated content and a dynamically reciprocal membership roster involving various degrees of opt-in, invitation, referral, and self-assertion. Hence, Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, you name it. If there were such thing as a “social data warehouse,” that would have to refer to user-generated personal-subject domain analytic content, metadata, rules, policies, calculations, and visualizations packaged up for reciprocal sharing with others. Oh, wait, that’s BI mashup maturity level 4, per my Forrester report on same. Let’s keep calling it BI mashup for now—until the mashups get packaged as “appliances” (e.g., on flash drives). Then, voila—personal mashups sharable in “DW appliance” form factors—via sneakernet. Then again....nah....dumb idea. Scratch that thought.
2. Computerworld BI Perspectives conf: Pervasive, self-service, low-cost BI for operational intelligence--#1 customer requirement overheard.1:32 PM Sep 16th from TweetDeck
   JK2—Every organization is eager to take mundane basic analytics—i.e., traditional BI—out of IT’s lap, and shift focus to advanced analytics: predictive modeling, data mining, text mining, complex event processing, BPM-integrated analytics, etc. Clear cost reduction and strategic/competitive benefits
3. "Google's 'Data Liberation Front'" (http://bit.ly/j2oZw: jk--Yawn! Informationista Libertarians? Nah, Google just giving you your own data.10:13 AM Sep 16th from TweetDeck
   JK2—Hmmm...maybe “personal DW appliance” a way of liberating data. But flash drives a security vulnerability. Employees walking off with great gobs of critical corporate data. Gotta watch that.
4. Sun Oracle DB Mach w/ Exadata: I'm tad disappointed they don't offer solution packaging w/ BI, adv analytics, etc. Rivals going/gone there.8:13 AM Sep 16th from TweetDeck
   JK2—Rivals such as IBM and Sybase. Impressive as Exadata v2 is, Oracle seems to be competing mostly against Teradata and Netezza, neither of which has moved as aggressively into analytic solution appliances as they should. Teradata bundles some SAS analytic apps with its DW appliances. Netezza does the same with Kalido and some other partners. But I expect these and other DW appliance vendors to go very deep into analytic solution appliances in the coming year—leveraging add-on apps (their own plus partners’), vertical/horizontal logical domain models, and professional services ecosystems.
5. Sun Oracle DB Machine w/ Exadata: comprehensive pushdown optimization of analytic & OLTP functions to intelligent storage layer. Excellent!8:11 AM Sep 16th from TweetDeck
   JK2—Rings all the right bells: scalability (multi-petabyte; faster CPU, memory, disk, I/O throughput; faster scans and loads; more efficient compression), affordability ($20K/TB), flexibility (comprehensive pushdown optimization of analytic & OLTP functions to intelligent storage layer; smart flash cache; storage management improvements; packaging as quarter, half, and full rack, etc.).
6. Sun Oracle Database Machine with Exadata: $20K/TB for multi-petabyte very-high-perf DW appliance with strong compression. 2 thumbs up!8:09 AM Sep 16th from TweetDeck
   JK2—Such a strong release, I’m wondering how they can top this with splashy announcements at OpenWorld next month. We’ll see.
7. Daily IT vendor press release glut starting to built to expected, typical post-Labor Day volumes.7:58 AM Sep 16th from TweetDeck
   JK2—If you do this job long enough, you have this rhythm in your bones.
8. RT @genevilleneuve "wasn't sure if you wanted to be cited....thanks again for [Svc-Or Analytics] insight!" JK--My pleasure: great session!7:49 AM Sep 16th from TweetDeck
   JK2—Service-Oriented Analytics. I’ll be happy to discuss in one-on-ones with customers at Forrester Business and Technology Forum, Chicago, Thurs-Fri Oct 8-9 (http://bit.ly/e2oBE).
9. "Autonomy Applies Adv Meaning-based Tech to Transform DBMS Market" (http://bit.ly/2y6ao): jk--Predictive probabilistic query inference.6:23 AM Sep 16th from TweetDeck
   JK2—The fastest queries are those that never need to be made. They’re the future queries you eliminate by inferring what the requester’s really looking and delivering it to them. Predictive, pre-emptive analytics applied to the heart and soul of BI.
10. So proud of self: able to integrate Service-Oriented Analytics into Computerworld BI talk. Will definitely discuss in FORR blog soon.5:23 PM Sep 15th from TweetDeck
    JK2—Yes, I’m working on that.
11. RT @Oracle PR: Oracle Unveils Exadata v2: First DB Machine for OLTP: JK--REPORTERS: Very significant release: call my mobile for comment.5:13 PM Sep 15th from TweetDeck
    JK2—No reporter calls. Looking at the coverage, I don’t think they grasp the significance. More important release than Exadata v1 last year. Key milestone in industry evolution of EDW into an analytic application server.
12. I'll be speaking today from 2:55-3:40pm (central) on self-service BI mashup. Computerworld BI Perspectives. Westin Chicago River North.12:46 PM Sep 15th from TweetDeck
    JK2—Thank you everybody for attending, and for your great questions. We’ll be in touch.
13. TweetDeck--with current content--loads faster than most other apps on my desktop. Hence, TweetDeck's becoming my first-up app.11:28 AM Sep 15th from TweetDeck
    JK2—And it delivers a surprisingly representative cross-sampling of latest industry news and scuttlebutt—I’m following the crème de la crème of them.
14. "Actuate & Infobright Announce High-Perf Virtual Machine for BI & DW" (http://bit.ly/n2jdG): jk--Fully open source DW/BI virtual appliance.8:13 AM Sep 15th from TweetDeck
    JK2—I’m not seeing a lot of customer adoption or interest in virtual BI software appliances, of which there are only a few on the market.
15. Opposite business analytics/optimization cultures: the SWAGs vs. the Stats. Former rely on gut intuition, the latter on hard numbers.12:49 PM Sep 14th from web
    JK2—Typically, the SWAGs write the checks for the tools used by the Stats. Therein lies a tension that keeps the Stats from gaining the upper hand. That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Business is intuitive, at its heart, as is science. Both disciplines rely on numbers to steer the ship, but depend on visionaries who can see the future through the cloud of often distracting stats.
16. "Google Plans Mirror Tech for Green Computing" (http://bit.ly/Utx7q): jk--Article disappoints. Thought was diabolic plot to blind Microsoft.7:29 AM Sep 14th from TweetDeck
    JK2—Has anybody noticed how rapidly “green” fell into the “not” side of the “hot/not” buzzword spectrum.
17. "Web 2.0 and SaaS: A Breeding Ground for Crime?" (http://bit.ly/udsVt): jk--What th?!? Cloud, virtualization, & SOA too? Nu paradigms toxic?7:06 AM Sep 14th from TweetDeck
    JK2—Clear sign of trade press straining for sensationalism.
18. Huh? "Coffee" now following me on Twitter. The stuff's stalking me now. Tables are turned. Let's see if it finds @jameskobielus addictive.6:51 AM Sep 14th from TweetDeck
    JK2—Those Twitterbots have become so obnoxious with the “I’m following you” e-mails. I’m only following those entities that I’ve actually heard of, and might have something useful to tweet. I’ve heard of this caffeine-bearing bean, but I doubt that its virtual presence would comfort me as much as its physical instantiation. So I decline.

Aweekstweets Sept 7-14 2009 @jameskobielus

1. Contemplating bandwidth (the metaphorical). Ratio of timewidth to taskwidth. Wide time, narrow task = plenty of bandwidth. Opposite: now, me20 minutes ago from TweetDeck
   JK2—Q3 drawing to a close. Deliverable closure activity even more dense, intense—especially when you’re also on the road.
2. @CurtMonash @SethGrimes @jamet123 I'll be speaking at Teradata Partners. Would like to catch Pred Analytics World. I live in DC area.about 19 hours ago from TweetDeck
   JK2—I’ll be speaking at Teradata Partners on in-database analytics: business drivers, use cases, approaches, standards, maturity, vendor support, futures. It’s the convergence point between my two core Forrester coverage areas: data warehousing and data mining/predictive analytics. Predictive Analytics World is happening the same week, in the same area (Washington DC metro area), where, coincidentally, I reside (not often that tech conferences I want/need to attend are in the DC area—strange that two should happen in the same week).
3. Pondering the convergence of analytic and transactional database appliances. Evolved DW as the new analytic app server.about 22 hours ago from web
   JK2—This is the thesis of my in-database analytics preso at Teradata Partners, plus the Forrester teleconference I did last week, plus the upcoming Forrester report I’ve drafted. In a nutshell, analytic data repositories—with deep history, multiple subject domains, complex information sets—are getting too massive to move. It makes sense to move predictive-analytic application logic to where the data lives--the enterprise data warehouse (EDW)--than to move the data to physically distinct analytical data marts. The benefits of in-database analytics (aka “no-copy analytics”) include bandwidth saving, faster data prep and scoring, and improved model governance. As more application logic migrates to the EDW and as these apps are wrapped in SOA/REST interfaces, this platform becomes a more mission-critical analytic app server.
4. rt @markrittman Oracle to announce another "database machine", this time based on Sun hardware and aimed at OTLP : http://bit.ly/fSFfh
   JK2—Really? That would make sense: transactional app logic will move to analytic app servers (aka EDWs) such as current Oracle Database Machine with Exadata. Other EDW vendors are moving down similar roadmaps. I’m looking forward to Oracle OpenWorld next month. Seeing as how the European regulators are holding up the Sun acquisition, there may not be any attention to the Oracle/Sun roadmap at that show. For obvious reasons.
5. "Anti-Tweet Business Retreat" (http://bit.ly/17PxqY): jk--Saddle up the ponies, ride the range. No tweeting allowed. Birds: this means u 2!about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck
   JK2—Yeah, yeah, cowpoke. The city slickers are smarter than you give ‘em credit fer. They’ll tweet from their phones, all the time pretending that they’re dialing a particularly long phone number just to call that pretty little filly back in the city and brag about how they’re roughing it.
6. "How to Calculate Data Warehouse Reliability" (http://bit.ly/17mlFd): JK--Very cool, precise, analytical yet actionable assessment metric.about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck
   JK2—I’d like to develop a similar metric on data warehouse scalability.
7. "Silicon Valley is shrinking" (http://bit.ly/725Ho): jk--So's my Rust Belt hometown. Welcome to the "gee remember those good ol' days" club.about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck
   JK2—Let’s state this in a slightly different way. Silicon Valley has been virtualized to the world. The new “garage” is the social network of familiar strangers hatching new enterprises in the cloud. The earthbound “valley,” no matter how lovely, will be eclipsed by shifting clouds overhead, which know no borders.
8. "Raytheon To Buy Internet Pioneer BBN" (http://bit.ly/1EdS2Q): jk--I'd forgotten BBN still existed. Pioneered use of "@" in e-mail address.about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck
   JK2—Remember when that symbol, which was on most manual and typewriter keyboards, effectively stood for “each” or “individual”? As in lists that had lines such as “99@ bottles of beer on the wall.”
9. "Twitter and the New Social Marketing Game" (http://bit.ly/1TaitE): jk--"Twitter is a social space, not a selling space"? Don't be naive!about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck
   JK2—That’s what we all said about blogs. Now my blog provider offers a tab labeled “monetize.”
10. "10 Ways To Complement the Enterprise RDBMS Using Hadoop" (http://bit.ly/7DRIc): jk--Yes. Virtualize DW with HDFS i/f. In-cloud analytics.about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck JK2—Here’s part of the confusion. Hadoop refers to an advanced-analytic function development workflow model applicable to complex content, including but not limited to what’s in DBMSs. It also refers to a distributed file system to support that content-rich model. Over the coming 5 years, today’s relational DBMS, the Hadoop Distributed File System (HDFS), and other persistence approaches will be virtualized into a more all-encompassing cloud of spindle and cache, structured and unstructured, at-rest and in-motion analytic content. “Virtualized DW” is too restrictive a term for this coming environment, but it’ll have to do for now.
11. @jamet123 "Removing Decisioning From the SDLC" (http://bit.ly/14kwCt): jk--Service-oriented analytics. Reusable decisioning svcs. Agile dev.about 1 hour ago from TweetDeck
    JK2—I agree with Mr. Taylor. Software development life cycles usually flow in the classic waterfall. But inline decisioning services are evolved in an iterative, dynamic, collaborative, agile fashion. That’s because these services depend on predictive models maintained by analysts—i.e., subject matter experts who themselves work in such a fashion, independent of software developers. Service-oriented analytics is SOA in the predictive modeling realm: enabling maximum reuse of predictive models among teams of analysts leveraging each other’s expertise on business problems that cross multiple domains.
12. "Oracle finally updates flagship database" (http://bit.ly/cwQD0): JK--Oracle DB 11g R2 is very substantial release: scalability, performanceabout 1 hour ago from TweetDeck
    JK2—And high availiabity too. My fave of many new features: Oracle RAC One Node. It supports server consolidation by leveraging RAC technology to enable clustering, load balancing, and failover across server blades in a single node.
13. "IBM Chief Economist Says Recession Is Over" (http://bit.ly/G9wU5): jk--Private-sector economists feel first pulse of fresh vigor. Pay heed!about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck
    JK2—Which brings up academic hairsplitting questions such as “what’s an economy?” and “what’s a recession?” [Note: This tech analyst has a degree in economics from the University of Michigan—Ann Arbor]. There are so many possible economic indicators you could point to (individually or in clusters, from GDP through consumer confidence, lending, hiring, profits, inventories, stock prices, etc) on so many possible levels (micro-economic or macro-economic, across so many sectors, regions, and countries), so many comparative baselines (absolute growth, percentage growth, comparisons with last quarter or year, comparison with worst-case scenario of Great Depression II), and so many authorities voicing their opinions on all this all the time through all possible channels. You accept Ben Bernanke’s word. Others heed Jim Cramer. Some listen to the president of the United States, who’s listening to his advisors. Still others think IBM’s chief economist has a thing or two to say on the matter. We’re all grasping at straws, until the next boom, however we slice, dice, and define it, is here in full force, undeniable.
14. "SSDs Ready For The Enterprise" (http://bit.ly/mf75V): jk--Flash storage will be all the rage in DW query/mart appliances in 2010 & beyond.about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck
    JK2—By 2015, flash storage will be standard in the query/host tier in all DW appliances.
15. "From Amazon To IBM, What 12 Cloud Computing Vendors Deliver" (http://bit.ly/bxbsF): jk--Great analysis. Check out cloud comparison chart.about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck
    JK2—Some trade papers have excellent analysts on staff. They call them “reporters.” Guess which reporter-analysts all analyst-analysts read.
16. "Using social media to turn staff into customer svc reps" (http://bit.ly/QtOdU): jk--And thru self-service letting customers rep themselves.about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck
    JK2—Social media, coupled with business activity monitoring, will bring this vision to fruition. See Natalie Petouhoff and my preso on this topic at next month’s Forrester Business and Technology Forum in Chicago.
17. "XML Threatens Big Data? Bull@*#!" (http://bit.ly/11cMMu): jk--Usually, XML gets staged, transformed, compressed before DW. Crunched to fit.about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck
    JK2—Apparently, this headline was written by Penn and Teller. I did a piece for the now-defunct Business Communications Review in 2005 on this very topic, from a transactional computing standpoint. With data warehousing, XML is almost never loaded into the production tables, or into cubes. XML is usually a source format that gets transformed at the staging layer to some more storage-efficient format, with the semantics of the original XML content managed in the corresponding ETL/DW/BI metadata layer.
18. "Madison" (http://bit.ly/Gk0kT): jk--Wisconsin capital. MSFT DW appliance: scales from Monona to Mendota to Michigan. Deep, fresh data lakesabout 2 hours ago from TweetDeck JK2—Note: This tech analyst also has a journalism degree: from the University of Wisconsin—Madison. The capital city of America’s Dairyland is on a scenic isthmus between two reasonably large inland lakes: Monona (to the south) and Mendota (the larger, to the north, upon whose southern shore sits that university, and in whose waters the plane carrying soul legend Otis Redding crashed in 1967). Madison sits in southern Wisconsin, around 90-something miles to the west of the only Great Lake that sits entirely within the USA’s borders. Seattle’s about 2,000 miles to the west. Aliso Viejo CA, where the bulk of SQL Server “Project Madison” development is taking place, is perhaps 1,500 miles south of Seattle, just north of San Diego. Draw a triangle on the map between Madison, Seattle, and Aliso Viejo, and, smack dab in the middle, you’ll find Yellowstone or Grand Teton. Both of them would make find codenames for this Microsoft project project. Especially Grand Teton: scaling petabyte mountain. I always chuckle remembering what Grand Tetons means in French.
19. "Surfing in Hawaii" (http://bit.ly/2AScHT): jk--KONA important release for Kalido. Even more important for Netezza: DW governance appliance.about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck JK2—Netezza can’t keep margins healthy without move toward solution-based packaging of advanced analytics and data management offerings, such as MDM. Kalido can’t stay in the game without wide range of DW appliance partnerships.
20. "MySpace, Facebook, Other Social Ntwks Account for 20% of Online Display Ads" (http://bit.ly/Zjcf6): jk--Display ads. Play ads? Social ads?about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck
    JK2—Ads migrate toward the virtual places where people truly live. Toward social networks, where the ads become an integral component of the relationships that sustain those environments. Not so much ads that display themselves, but ads that figure into people’s social lives. Ads that add to the community, not just suck cash and patience from it.
21. "11 Apache Technologies That Have Changed Computing" (http://bit.ly/F76Nx): jk--Love these substance-packed eWeek slideshows. #15: Hadoop!about 2 hours ago from TweetDeck
    JK2—Apache is as formative to Web 2.0 as IETF was to Internet 1.0.
22. The ZapForum DC event (http://bit.ly/130tZQ). I'll be there. New poem composed for occasion: "SOA DOA? No Way!" (http://bit.ly/1DXHe0)about 5 hours ago from TweetDeck
    JK2—Yeah, I stuck with my tried-n-true triple-haiku. It germinated the night before. It terminated my sleep early on the morning after. It culminated in a quick foxtrot to the laptop with bang and beep and a tweak till it came out just right. For that occasion—in 3 weeks. I never truly intended to write it on the spot as a door prize. Or, rather, I toyed with the idea and then realized I’m not Nipsey Russell.
23. Social network analysis: look for patterns of background, behavior, preference, interaction of which people are unaware. Make them aware.about 13 hours ago from TweetDeck
    JK2—Social networks aren’t really networks. They’re simply contexts within which people may eventually find themselves and others to be more alike than different—or which they may be found by others to be an affinity cluster capable of being addressed for fun and profit.
24. Catch and keep a customer. Covet the customer list. Uncover the customer social networks. Social network analysis: next-gen data mining.about 13 hours ago from TweetDeck
    JK2—Relationship mining and predictive relationship analytics. Discover the full extent of the current B2C relationship and/or predict the most likely B2C relationships that may be brought into being—through well-targeted sales, marketing, customer service, and other efforts.
25. Smiling. Have significantly expanded my knowledge of today's data mining market, and tomorrow's. I'm curiosity's cat, of Cheshire varietyabout 15 hours ago from TweetDeck
    JK2—My Forrester Wave on Predictive Analytics and Data Mining Solutions. Essentially, mining the value prop of the current vendors/solutions and predicting how that is likely to evolve over the next few years. No, there have been no mind-blowing revelations. It’s just good to evaluate them all, their current offerings and roadmaps, side by side by side. The demos have been particularly enlightening.
26. "Database-less DW": That actually federated data management with robust DQ and MDM. That's also a pipe dream. @markmadsen @Claudia_Imhoff \about 19 hours ago from TweetDeck
    JK2—You need a centralized DW to be the governance focus for ensuring the quality of the “golden record.” Of course, this paradoxical phrase—“database-less data warehouse”--is not technically accurate. Even in federation environments where you have no DW (centralized or hub-and-spoke), you still generally source/OLTP databases that are storing data and responding to queries. If you take this “warehouse” notion for the metaphor that it in fact is, then the “database-less DW” is analogous to a just-in-time supply chain without transshipment depots. Customer orders get routed in real-time to the factories, which respond with production runs and shipments in real-time.
27. The fact that DW startups are getting new leases on life through fresh funding shows a) economy improving and b) analytics remains red-hot.about 19 hours ago from TweetDeck
    JK2—And c) some DW vendors have hot enough IP and hot enough visions that investors still find impressive enough to bet on.
28. Enjoyed James McQuivey #forrester discussion of Social TV research ongoing. I'm doing it: Twitter/Facebook over Verizon FIOS.3:28 PM Sep 10th from TweetDeck
    JK2—When I say “I’m doing it,” I mean “I’ve played with it.” I’m not doing it now. I don’t do most of my tweeting or facebooking that way. Mostly, because I don’t have a keyboard that connects with my FIOS TV service. Also, because I don’t watch much TV anymore. And because, when I do watch TV, the only interface I have any tolerance for is the remote—and the only functions that suit me are on/off, volume +/-, and channel +/-.
29. RT @TonyBaer: RT @jameskobielus & Rob Karel "INFA deal... HP’s last brave attempt....." jk--Not so. We couch it as "case could be made."1:34 PM Sep 10th from TweetDeck
    JK2—In that blogpost, what we said specifically was: “One could even make a case for the Informatica deal representing HP’s last brave attempt to mount a credible data management software strategy.” And then we follow it with a challenge to HP: “If HP is truly serious about becoming a full-fledged data management software provider, now is the time to make strategic acquisitions in the DI, DQ, MDM, BI, PA/DM, and other key solution markets.” Doesn’t sound like we’re sounding the death knell on HP’s data management strategy, does it?
30. Rather enjoyed the flight up to Boston this eve. Coincidentally @CurtMonash was 1 row up across aisle. Made nice non-tweet industry chitchat8:45 PM Sep 9th from TweetDeck
    JK2—And we gave each other our respective quiet zones. Curt could see me zoning—or, rather, Zuning—with my music and thoughts. I love flying.
31. Finding folks confusing my upcoming FORR PA/DM Wave & FORR rpt on in-db analytics. These are 2 distinct projects, y'all, but complementary.5:05 PM Sep 9th from TweetDeck
    JK2—The Forrester Wave on Predictive Analytics and Data Mining Solutions will be published by year-end. The Forrester report “In-Database Analytics: Heart of the Predictive Enterprise” is substantially and will be published in the next several weeks. I plan to blog about it soon.
32. I'm well along with the exec strategy briefings and demos on my Forrester PA/DM Wave. Soon will do ref customer interviews.5:04 PM Sep 9th from TweetDeck
    JK2—The reference customer interviews are where I test the vendors’ claims by speaking to users about their experiences. It’s not perfunctory.
33. RT @jamet123 @soachief @rschmelzer @DavidLinthicum @jpmorgenthal @TheEbizWizard "reuse decisions made w/them" jk--Reuse best practices too!4:56 PM Sep 9th from TweetDeck
    JK2—Re what I’m calling “service-oriented analytics,” I’ll sum up for you all the things that James Taylor and I said should be reused: best practices, predictive models, predictive modelers, decisioning services, decisions. Here are my thoughts on how they can be reused: best practices (through what Forrester calls “BI Solution Centers,” on which Boris Evelson and I published a report last year); predictive models (through predictive model governance tools such as those offered by SAS, SPSS, KXEN, and others); predictive modelers (by cultivating advanced analytics experts who work across many projects, applications, and business units); decisioning services (through convergence of business rules engines, BPM, and BI; see Forrester report that Boris, John Rymer, and Colin Teubner published last year), and decisions (by making the right decisions, which then serve as proper precedent for future business problems).
34. True story: Here at RRWashNatlAirpt, me going for meal, overhear guy say "We have best DW in world, it's called [vendor]." No, not telling.4:51 PM Sep 9th from TweetDeck
    JK2—And not agreeing. Studying this industry for a living, I can tell you they all have their strengths and weaknesses. See my Forrester Wave on Enterprise Data Warehousing Platforms, from this past February.
35. Did great briefing today from MicroStrategy on their BI-integrated predictive analytics and data mining solution, partnership, strategy.2:52 PM Sep 9th from web
    JK2—For me, a “great briefing” is when I get a deep dive on what a vendor’s doing now, and what they plan to do over the coming year or so. Doesn’t necessarily mean I think they’re the best vendor in their niche. But MicroStrategy does indeed have one of the most interesting approaches to BI-integrated PA/DM in the industry. Check the recent Forrester report on convergence of PA/DM into the core BI stack, which I co-authored with Boris and Leslie Owens.
36. ZapForum DC: Asked Ron to change my descriptor from "SOA chatterbox" to "Champion of Service-Oriented Analytics." Same dude different facets2:50 PM Sep 9th from web
    JK2—I have every right to self-brand.
37. @soachief @rschmelzer @DavidLinthicum @jpmorgenthal @TheEbizWizard: jk4--Predictive/agile enterprise -> Keep on hitting moving targets.9:41 AM Sep 9th from TweetDeck
    JK2—Business is just a never-ending stream of bets. Hey Socrates, you could say the same about life itself.
38. @soachief @rschmelzer @DavidLinthicum @jpmorgenthal @TheEbizWizard: jk2--Service-oriented analytics -> comprehensive in-cloud analytics9:33 AM Sep 9th from TweetDeck
    JK2—Check out discussion of inline analytics maturity model, culminating in “comprehensive cloud analytics,” from my recent Forrester teleconference: “In-Database Analytics: Transforming The Data Warehouse Into The New Analytic Application Server.” Same scope as forthcoming Forrester report authored by self.
39. HP/Informatica alliance sets HP on path to deliver analytic solution appliances with Neoview inside. Needs BI to be complete, though.7:01 AM Sep 9th from TweetDeck
    JK2—See Rob Karel and my recent blogpost: “HP and Informatica’s Expanded Relationship: Portent of Bigger Deals to Come?”
40. Still encountering resistance from Hadoop community to be discussed in "in-db analytics" context, but I discuss in re "in-cloud analytics."6:54 AM Sep 9th from TweetDeck
    JK2—Hadoop won’t come to fruition until it’s integrated into data warehouses everywhere. Data warehouses, in turn, will evolve into clouds
41. "Pluck to Launch Social Media Application Server" (http://bit.ly/tmngG): jk--New solution segment? Or renaming of collaboration solutions?7:19 AM Sep 8th from TweetDeck
    JK2—Not sure this makes sense as a separate silo product niche for premises deployment. Social media is all about converging interaction channels. It’s also about all things cloud, Web 2.0, and SaaS.
42. "A Fact-Based Defense of Enterprise 2.0" (http://bit.ly/23QsNi): jk--Huh? Did someone create a new religion and not tell the rest of us?6:50 AM Sep 8th from TweetDeck
    JK2—Who, if anyone, wrote the enterprise 1.0 gospel? Adam Smith? Andrew Carnegie? Peter Drucker? Tom Peters?
43. Suffered 5 bee stings in one attack mowing the lawn Saturday morning. Little buggers ambushed me toward the very end of my mow.5:59 AM Sep 7th from TweetDeck
    JK2—I’m better now. Thanks for asking.

poem SOA DOA? No Way!

SOA DOA? NO WAY!

Yep! SOA’s to
thank for many memorable
lunches and junkets.

Yep! We’re cashing in
on its cachet, careers on
its lingering vogue.

OK rogues! Enough
bashing! More service-mashing
and silo-smashing!

Aweekstweets August 31-September 7 2009 @jameskobielus

AWEEKSTWEETS AUG 31-SEPT 7 2009

1. Sorta curious why people seem to imagine it's OK to request free reports and free slices of my time. I'm an analyst. We're in business.14 minutes ago from TweetDeck
JK2—It’s not as if we—analysts generally, me specifically--don’t already provide ample free slices of our brainpower through tweets, blogs, podcasts, public speeches, comments to press, e-mail back-and-forth, random/not-so encounters at conferences, and the like. If you’re a vendor or user, I’ll refer your requests to a Forrester account manager. If you’re a personal friend who wants to chat about non-work-related stuff, this doesn’t apply. But I will get back to you after-hours. Gotta eat.

2. Jotting down string of DW-pricing tweets now to set frame for "AWEEKSTWEETS" blog exegesis I'll be laying down come Monday...when not lazingabout 8 hours ago from TweetDeck
JK2—What follows.

3. RT @merv RT "DW appl ...Price full core ....in $/TB for .... (and discounts!)" JK--Discount-from-list factor. I'm seeing 50%+ discounts nowabout 8 hours ago from TweetDeck
JK2—Everybody’s moving inexorably into the sub-$25K/TB range. Price pressures are acute on all DW appliance vendors, owing to a) encroaching commoditization of core DW stack, b) ever cheaper commodity CPUs and storage within DW appliances, c) intensifying glut of new vendors/products, d) soft economy and tight IT budgets, e) growing open-source and SaaS presence in DW market, and f) increasing vendor positioning of DW appliances as low-margin hook to sell premium add-on applications and professional services (i.e., the old Gillette “razor and blades” business model).

4. Add-on apps? You know, like IBM's doing with its Smart Analytic System solution appliances. Or Aster with its MapReduce appliance.about 8 hours ago from TweetDeck
JK2—I fully expect all leading DW appliance vendors to go this route over the coming 1-2 years—either through their own app/solution stack (those who have them), through strategic partnerships, and/or through buying or being bought out by those who do.

5. In other words, that's referring to commodity pricing of core DW appliance stack. You can/should also factor premium pricing of add-on apps.about 8 hours ago from TweetDeck
JK2—Add-on apps also include/leverage the logical domain models, derived from vendors’ professional services engagements addressing various horizontal/process and vertical/industry requirements. Riding a full DW stack, the logical domain models, with associated modeling tools and APIs, enable the vendor to position its DW appliance as an extensible solution platform, for partner- and customer-enablement.

6. Keep in mind that's simply referring to pricing of the DW-appliance "core stack": DBMS, query tools, loading tools, workload mgt, db admin.about 8 hours ago from TweetDeck
JK2—Yes, the core stack. Same functional scope as what I evaluated in the Forrester EDW Platforms Wave earlier this year. Check it out (note: you must be Forrester customer).

7. Hey DW appl vendors, if you denominate your pricing per the previous tweet, we have comparability. If you don't, your competitors will.about 8 hours ago from TweetDeck
JK2—In other words, your competitors will twist your publicly announced pricing, in all its ambiguity, to their advantage and your disadvantage. I see it all the time. Forrester customers turn to me to help clear up the confusion.

8. Hey all DW appl vdrs: Price full core stack: hw&sw. State acq cost in $/TB for compr-user-data cap . State raw-to-usable-stor & compr ratiosabout 8 hours ago from TweetDeck
JK2—I’ll decompress that tweet here. If I ruled the world, DW vendors would frame their price structure as follows: Price out a full core DW appliance stack (for the production DW tables only, encompassing the components handling query/mart, hub, and staging nodes, but not including any test/dev platform, and not including any associated BI or ETL/data integration components/nodes): hardware (servers, direct-attached storage, interconnect), software (licenses for DBMS, query planning and optimization tools, loading tools, workload management and resource governance tools, and other database administration software tools). Denominate your pricing in terms of upfront acquisition cost in US dollars per terabyte (TB), but exclude any deployment- or optimization-related upfront professional services, and also exclude any first-year or out-year maintenance fees. State your pricing in terms of capacity of TBs of compressed usable data that can be stored on your DW appliance. Provide customers/prospects with the key information need to translate raw storage capacity to usable-data capacity: a) your ratio of raw-to-usable data (deducting indexes, tablespaces, and other DW/DBMS overhead from raw to derive usable) and b) your compression ratio/efficiency (or at least the range of compression efficiencies that customers are likely to see on the types of data they are likely to storage/manage in your DW appliance). Don’t agonize over the “price per TB of storage doesn’t even begin to spell out the tremendous performance advantages of our DW appliance with our special architecture” concern. That’s an important nuance—price/performance—you should address as a qualification ONLY AFTER YOU’VE ESTABLISHED YOUR COMMODITY PER-STORAGE DW-APPLIANCE PRICING BONAFIDES!

9. RT @SethGrimes "Anything to say on Informatica's acquisition of Agent Logic announced Wed?" jk---Left voice-msg commentary with Jeff Kelly.10:41 AM Sep 4th from TweetDeck
JK2—Jeff, at searchdatamanagement.com, has a longer lag time than other pubs/reporters who cover this space. He hasn’t yet acknowledged receiving my message. Here’s my comment in a nutshell: Informatica needed a CEP acquisition to add a true-real-time component to its otherwise near-complete data integration suite. Agent Logic is not a CEP vendors that Forrester customers ask about much, or one that its competitors mention much, so I doubt this acquisition will provide Informatica with much of a revenue contribution. But, given the strong true-real-time features of competitors such as IBM and Ab Initio, this is a smart move on Informatica’s part. I expect to see them integrate Agent Logic’s technology tightly into their PowerCenter product family in the coming year, not wasting any time.

10. Paper is definitely my favorite medium for analysis. Somehow, having physical impressions of all data to thumb thru, annotate, focuses me.9:43 AM Sep 4th from TweetDeck
JK2—If it’s purely on-screen, I get tired and sleepy very fast. Having physical tokens of information to run my fingers over somehow keeps me awake. Even better than coffee (though, like the latter, too much too long tends to give the jitters).

11. RT @WinstonChen "MDM-DW who's the boss?: jk--Neither. Trustworthy business analytics--i.e, the "golden record" imperative--is the boss!9:38 AM Sep 4th from TweetDeck
JK2—Technologies don’t rule. Besides, this is like arguing whether yin or yang’s the boss. Single version of the truth demands the DW as the key master data management repository. In other words, a DW without life-cycle data governance is just another database.

12. Anti-social media would be good now & then. Put up the do-not-disturb sign across all social ntwk services. Pushback spam into spammer faces8:50 AM Sep 4th from TweetDeck
JK2—My do-not-disturb sign is implicit. I turn technologies off. I close my eyes. I go for a walk.

13. Remembering back when we worried about info overload. Now we treat info like electrical "load," and our brains like circuitry bearing loads9:45 PM Sep 3rd from TweetDeck
JK2—It’s sort of like the difference between before you could verbalize on a keyboard, and now, when you scarcely realize you’re verbalizing most of your life on a keyboard. We rewire with some discomfort, but we rewire, inexorably.

14. Finished first full draft of FORR report "In-Database Analytics: Heart of the Predictive Enterprise." Now in peer review.9:39 PM Sep 3rd from TweetDeck
JK2—And I expect Rob and Boris to get back to me with full, deep comments on the coming week. We’re all so friggin’ busy, and Q3 is drawing to a close, that none of us can afford to delay this too long. I, for example, am also working on a TEI study, a Wave, and an FLB doc—as well as a BTF preso and one or two other Forrester deliverables that will come back to my mind in just a sec....as soon as the coffee kicks on.

15. RT @merv RT @timoelliott @weckerson "every analysis should lead to action" JK--Should lead to decision, such as choice not to act.8:23 AM Sep 3rd from TweetDeck
JK2—I just had to insert my two cents on this perennial BI-analyst philosophical/ontological topic. It’s sort of like the perennial freewill vs. determinism concept in philosophy at large. The issue will never be settled. But philosophers use it to break the ice, and break the spirits of lowly undergraduates.

16. RT @weckerson: #enzee "biggest endorsement of Netezza TwinFin is SAS decision to embed functions" jk--Netezza has strong in-db partnerships.8:07 AM Sep 3rd from TweetDeck
JK2—On which I’ll provide a bit more info in my coming/above-mentioned Forrester report: “"In-Database Analytics: Heart of the Predictive Enterprise." To be published in a month or so. No firm ETA yet. Forrester publication dates are outside my direct control

17. Always puzzled when vendors surprised they've caught Forrester's ear. Not hard to do. I'll talk to everybody in my space, time permitting.6:59 AM Sep 3rd from TweetDeck
JK2—“Time permitting” is the key qualifier. Time is always tight. I have to prioritize. Usually, I prefer that you simply e-mail me your pitch/materials to jkobielus@forrester.com. If you want me to consider giving you a half-hour of my time, please submit your request through www.forrester.com/briefings and specify me by name; recognize, though, that I may decline, based on a) having a full calendar and/or b) not finding your pitch interesting enough to warrant any time at all, though I still want to see it in writing. Don’t feel hurt if I decline. We get way more such requests than is humanly possible to accept. Also don’t feel slighted if I opt to do this over the phone, not in person; over the phone is far more efficient for me on a day-in/day-out basis. Furthermore, don’t imagine that I’m going to travel to your office, even if you’re physically close to me in northern Virginia; you come to me, not vice versa. Finally, I’m not in the Forrester HQ in Cambridge MA; please do a little bit of research (e.g, check my e-mail signature, which contains my physical office location) before blithely assuming that I, or any other Forrester analyst, works out of HQ. I see a steady stream of “hey Jim, I’ll be in Boston on such-and-such date and I’d love to meet you” vendor-briefing requests. Don’t you folks realize that most analysts in most firms are mostly home-based most of the time? Yes, I occasionally work from Forrester’s McLean VA office, but that’s the exception, not the rule.

18. Expecting my memory enhancement this morning. Till then, I'll simply have to swap everything I do immediately to disk--or scribble on paper6:30 AM Sep 3rd from TweetDeck
JK2—Got it. Tried to de-install the existing memory module on my own. Wouldn’t budget. Not going to force it out and risk damaging my laptop. Bringing it to the tech folks at the Cambridge MA HQ this week so they can do it for me. I’ll be at HQ for another reason, so just makes sense to do two-birds-one-stone. Yes, indeed, I occasionally go to HQ, but don’t assume that I have a regular schedule of such visits. On an as-needed basis.

19. RT @WinstonChen "Kalido KONA announced today. An important step in the evolution of data warehousing." jk--A DW governance appliance.
JK2—A DW appliance with best-of-breed, low-cost, commodity (mostly, not entirely) platform (Netezza) and add-on apps/tools from Kalido and QlikTech. Remember what I said above about DW vendors’ push in this direction. We’ll definitely see more. I’m surprised Lorita or Chas didn’t reach out to pre-brief us. Very important announcement.

20. RT @WinstonChen "MDM belongs in every DW." jk--In other words, every DW should house master records. DW belongs in MDM, not vice versa.9:42 PM Sep 2nd from TweetDeck
JK2—MDM, as an add-on app, belongs, as an optional (not mandatory) component in every DW appliance solution family. I’ll grant you that.

21. INFA buying AgentLogic doesn't confirm convergence of CEP into BI, cuz INFA's not BI. Rather, INFA's DI, and lacked true real-time (ie,CEP).7:23 PM Sep 2nd from TweetDeck
JK2—See aweekstweet exegesis above. CEP is indeed converging into BI, but there are more important industry announcements in the works. We’re moving into the fall announcement season.

22. RT @TonyBaer: @bmichelson @johnrrymer "Much of purpose of CEP is to decipher what's happening NOW " jk--Puts NOW in context of HISTORY.7:10 PM Sep 2nd from TweetDeck
JK2—Once again, just had to get my two cents in on this tweet discussion thread. This is perennial water-cooler ice-breaker chit-chat small-talk fodder among BI analysts. BTW, I’ve found Facebook a very good platform for connecting personal histories out there, in the Web 2.0 space. I’ve also found Twitter, auto-posting tweets as Facebook status updates, as a very good platform for the NOW of me to feed the HISTORY of me. For those who care for any of this ME ME ME narcissism.

23. RT @TonyBaer @johnrrymer @bmichelson "#CEP makes #BI literally actionable." jk--No. Orgs/folks actually taking action makes BI actionable.
JK2—Ah, yes. You see, I can’t help myself. More BI analyst small talk online. Please indulge us. If these were face-to-face encounters, this would all be accomplished through grunts, raised eyebrows, and knowing nods in each other’s general direction.

24. "Massive But Agile: Best Practices for Scaling the Next-Generation Enterprise Data Warehouse" (http://bit.ly/Z8ng6): jk--Comprehensive.3:13 PM Sep 2nd from TweetDeck
JK2—Thanks to Aster Data for linking to my doc. And excuse me for tooting my own horn. But is “comprehensive” self-congratulatory or simply descriptive of the fact that I sweated over that doc. But I am proud of the result, and Forrester customers have responded favorably.

25. Kalido's KONA Information Appliance puts it in the analytic-solution-stack appliance market. Important Netezza and QlikTech partnerships.2:08 PM Sep 2nd from TweetDeck
JK2—Clearly, the term “appliance” may soon become very yesteryear in this context. KONA and similar prepackaged, pre-optimized analytic solution platforms from other vendors will become a market segment all their own, distinct from the commodity DW appliances on which they run and which they extend.

26. BI value-prop: actionable intelligence. BI core: intelligence. BI key-diff: actionability: collab&wkflow integ. Vendors must enable latter.11:35 AM Sep 2nd from TweetDeck
JK2—The “action loop” in BI. In other words, BI embedded in business processes. I’m in Forrester’s Business Process and Applications (BP&A) orbit. One of our key emphases is embedded process analytics. BP&A description from our website: “This professional must improve or transform processes in an organization as well as the business applications and technologies that support them. He or she may also be responsible for integrating information and collaboration into the business process.”

27. Taking briefing from BI company Bi3 Solutions. Consulting firm mostly, but transitioning to solutions vendor. SaaS BI offering in beta.11:06 AM Sep 2nd from TweetDeck
JK2—Vendors take note: If I take a briefing from you, and it’s not under NDA (or, at least the fact that I’m speaking with you right now is not under NDA), I’m very likely to tweet the fact that I’m speaking with you (and share a smidgen of non-NDA info) right then and there.

28. RT @CurtMonash "Netezza claims 50X Exadata ...10X Teradata. #enzee" jk--Verify such marketing assertions with benchmarks, bake-offs.9:50 AM Sep 2nd from TweetDeck
JK2—I grow weary of these 10X, 20X, infinityX boilerplate “we scale like there’s no tomorrow” DW vendor assertions. I try not to republish any of them. I try to recast the discussion in terms of the vendor’s overall architecture, and its fitness/optimizability for a customer’s particular DW, BI, or analytics apps, loads, and queries.

29. Already thinking ahead to the FORR report on DW virtualization in cloud that I'll be doing in Q4. That, + my Wave, will culminate busy year.10:13 PM Sep 1st from TweetDeck
JK2—I’m staring at my rest-of-year schedule right now. Taped to my office wall. So I can’t forget. I won’t forget. I follow-through on my commitments. I’m just always trying to keep commitments in line with what’s humanly feasible. By the way, I work hard—and think modularly. The only way.

30. In-database analytics: subject of my FORR teleconf next week; podcast & blogpost later in Sept; & report in Oct. And preso at Teradata conf.10:12 PM Sep 1st from TweetDeck
JK2—A prime current example of how I work/think modularly. Reuse, adapt, and extend from a core research base. I plan my research agenda with all this in mind—months before I have to deliver any of it—if I can help it (sometimes I have to respond to stuff that just drops in unannounced in my agenda—I can do that too, but not without momentary.....ummmm.....headaches?).

31. Deep into vendor briefings and demos for FORR Wave on Predictive Analytics & Data Mining. Strong group of vendors. Many differentiators.10:06 PM Sep 1st from TweetDeck
JK2—Here’s a type of briefings/demos that I definitely DO NOT tweet, blog, podcast, or otherwise mention at the time I do them. Any research connected with an in-progress research project. You’ll see what I’m thinking/doing in good time—when the corresponding Forrester report is published (i.e., if you’re a Forrester customer). And not a moment before. Did I mention the whole gotta-eat imperative?

32. "Actuate Collab with Red Hat to Enhance JBoss Enterprise Middleware Apps " (http://bit.ly/3Wlxrg): jk--Hark! Methinks doth hear merger bells7:33 AM Sep 1st from TweetDeck
JK2—Seth Grimes (@SethGrimes) doesn’t hear those bells on this one. But I strongly suspect that a full open-source SOA/BI/DW/ETL/EII stack will soon emerge on the marketplace, and I strongly suspect it’ll be through Red Hat acquiring some of the usual suspects. We’ll see.

33. "Microsoft Lobbyists Reportedly Plot Strategy In 'Screw Google' Meetings In DC" (http://bit.ly/wZ5Dq): jk--Funniest headline of the morning.7:22 AM Sep 1st from TweetDeck
JK2—Just as funny a week later. Not sure if it’s true. Even if it were true, it’s one of those “software industry insider” and “political/regulatory/legal” topics that strikes me as just mundane “slow news day” trade-press blather.

34. Twitter's "won't you follow-me give-me-a-second-of-your-time solicitation via email" model isn't scalable. I seriously resent it now.2:56 PM Aug 31st from TweetDeck
JK2—I wish Twitter would e-mail me, once a week or as often as I tell it, a link to a webpage that allows me to quickly clickthrough acceptances/rejections of all these requests. Just as Postini or other hosted anti-spam services does with all the malware that targets my e-mail inbox. Because, in fact, these Twitter follow-me requests are just another form of spam.

35. RT @lmacvittie @davegraham @johnsonLAB "Disney to Acquire Marvel" jk--Old-school fabulist acquires newer-school. Absolutely MARVELous!10:33 AM Aug 31st from TweetDeck
JK2—Pun aside, I couldn’t care less. I’ve never been a huge Disney fan (still partial to old Warner Brothers on the animation side of the house). And I’ve never been a big Marvel fan (still partial to DC Comics on the superhero side of the house; Spidey, Hulk, Fantastic Four—I read them occasionally as a kid but always felt they were sort of pale ripoff of the real deal—OK....I know I’m absolutely going to flamed for saying this—here comes—YIKES!!!!!!).

36. RT @bmichelson: "why do PR people ask about writing "stories"?" jk--They conflate/confuse analysts with journalists, not fabulists.10:29 AM Aug 31st from TweetDeck
JK2—It’s funny. Throughout the 21-plus years I freelanced a column to Network World, PR flacks tended to assume I was a journalist on their payroll—a quick glance at their masthead would have set them straight. I was always, from the start, a freelance analyst who contributed analysis in the form of columns, features, and buyer’s guides. It’s a fine distinction that I suppose is lost on people who don’t share my vocation.

37. Noticing that "social networking/media" have replaced "cloud," "virtualization," and "SOA" in every vendor's me-too buzzword-bingo list.10:27 AM Aug 31st from TweetDeck
JK2—Yes, I’ve got scads of thoughts on “social everything.” I’ll blog/tweet all that in good time—as I develop something differentiated to put out there.

38. RT @DavidBThomas: "What's your dirty little social media secret?" http://bit.ly/nttaD: jk--It's everybody's secret: busybody browsing.9:30 AM Aug 31st from TweetDeck
JK2—I learn a surprising lot of stuff from simply toggling over to and glancing at my TweetDeck on a semi-obsessive basis. I guess it’s not really “browsing,” and not really “busybody,” since others haven’t chosen to block me. I learn less from from my Facebook. Blogs? Them too, but somehow the tweets feel fresher, more candid, more of-the-moment.

39. FORR podcast on BAM/in-process analytics future recorded. Me + @passion4process, re #BPM #CEP #BRE #BI. Will be posted for playback midweek8:33 AM Aug 31st from TweetDeck
JK2—I still don’t see it up there.

poem Virtual Picket

VIRTUAL PICKET

Beware a structure
wholly electrified. Step
with soles of rubber.

Barbs are benign. It's
those smooth currents contain the
most livid message.

Charge the merest brush
of dear proximity with
the heaviest load.